


Brand New Dance

by Whreflections



Series: Hanniholidays Prompts 2017 [5]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Conflicted Will Graham, F/M, HanniHolidays Prompt Calendar, M/M, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Recovering Hannibal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 12:04:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13189713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: For HanniHolidays Prompt Calendar Day 5- EggnogPost Fall.  Hannibal and Will have fled to Canada, where they're living in a 'borrowed' cabin and trying to recover from an ordeal that almost killed them both.Between the wrath of his lamb that drove him into the Atlantic, and the wrath of the dragon that left him vulnerable,it's going to be months before Hannibal's ready to travel again.Will is going a little stir crazy, because while he isn't sure what in the hell he wants, long term, the things he's wanting at the moment are full of impossibility.  He can't just leave his life behind and forge a new one with Hannibal just like that...can he?  After all the steps that brought them here, it doesn't seem right that it could ever be that easy.





	Brand New Dance

**Author's Note:**

> I am still loving these, and I really think they're helping me write again by prodding at my imagination. It's a very nice feeling <3 I'm so glad you guys are enjoying them, too.

Just after stepping into the living room, Will pauses to listen to the sounds from the kitchen.  Under the circumstances, they should be ominous.  He should, at the very least, feel phantom twinges of foreboding from the scars near his hairline and across his stomach, but the feeling in his stomach isn't that sort of pain.  Not a pull at his scar tissue, just a deep sinking, like a pit drawn down and down, tunneling deeper the longer he stands.  The cold of the woods has made his shoulder and cheek ache fiercely; his jaw held so tense to ease the stretch that the muscle just beneath his jawline cramps suddenly.   Will presses the heel of his hand to it to soothe the jarring pain, rubbing slow and steady, almost in time with the soft sounds of metal on glass he can hear from the kitchen.  The gentle, muffled sounds of something being stirred. 

The ankles of Will's jeans hang wet and cold, dripping across the carpet and the tops of his boots.  If his father could see him like this, he'd be after him to get out of those wet clothes before he makes himself sick.  The lecture about what to wear while you're traipsing through knee high snow would've come after, once Will was already settled in front of the fire and warming, the heat of it kissing his toes like needles. 

It doesn't matter, really; his father has been gone since the days when Will worked his beat in New Orleans, but the wave of missing him seems somehow fresh.  What _would_ he say, if he could see Will like this?  Conventional wisdom would tell him that the face he'd make as he looked Will over would be one of thinly veiled disgust, if he bothered to veil it at all.  His voice, in telling Will to go back to his wife and son, would be rocky with his disapproval. 

Despite the urge to punish himself with it, that constructed scene doesn't fit.  His father was not a conventional man, and Will was never a conventional child, and there would be nothing but ache in his eyes seeing how battered his little boy looks just now.  He had told Will, once, that when he looked at him, if he looked too fast he still saw him at waist height, skinned knees and skinned elbows and a puppy in his hands.  There was both humor and truth in it, Will had known—there  was a certain look in his father's eyes when he wasn't seeing entirely in the present.  He didn't quite have Will's gifts, but they had that much in common. 

If his father were here, he wouldn't tell him to go back.  He would, instead, kiss the wound on his cheek, and the memory of old hurts held in the scar beneath his curls, and go to the kitchen to punch Hannibal Lecter in the face.  He wouldn't pull it, either—it would be enough to knock him back, unbalanced more by the pain from the pull in his abdomen than his rising black eye.  After Hannibal staggered, though, it would be enough.  Will's father would take a bag of frozen whatever-he-could-reach from the freezer, and hand it over, and shake his hand.  A blur of contrasts—rage because he could not hold it back, gentleness for the same reason. 

In his mind, Hannibal accepts the strike without retaliation, knowing the source.  It's rare Will wonders at the truth of his own imaginings, but he can't help but wonder, now, if his expectations are beginning to be colored by affection.  The inconvenience of feeling is affecting them both.  What will become of them if neither of them can see clearly enough to forge a path forward is an unknown that beats in Will's throat like a thorn lodged beneath his skin, throbbing its presence out of sight. 

 

On the whim that forward motion might ease that invisible wound and the pit in his stomach both, Will presses forward toward the noises carrying from the kitchen.  Intentional bread crumbs, he's sure—Hannibal can do much in silence if he chooses. 

There is little response from him when Will enters the room, but Will expects it, and catches what little there is—an intake of breath, a sudden, invisible ripple down his spine that turns it stiff.  He is smelling the snow, and the pines.  Possibly the earthier scent of the bark he touched; certainly the trace of blood on the webbing of his thumb where he nicked it.  Will is not entirely certain what his limitations are, but he wonders if he can scent even the swelling in his shoulder, the rush of fluid to pool around tissue overworked too soon. 

Hannibal settles his whisk onto the counter with a soft clink, and reaches for cream.  He's stored it in the only ceramic creamer available to him in this cabin they've borrowed, shaped like a cow and patterned with little bluebells.  The presence of it in his hand softens him somehow, leaves a lump in Will's throat that won't budge.  It's not decor Hannibal would have chosen in Baltimore, or Italy, but it matches the hominess of this little house and it's better than the carton from the store.  It allows, too, the illusion that he made the cream himself, that he isn't too weary to maintain his standards.  A veneer of homemaking, in a place that isn’t their home.

Hannibal pours with grace, always, and Will lets himself be drawn forward to watch.  The weight of the remnants of feeling left between them at his departure hangs in the space between them, forcing distance that Will presses against.  He imagines he can feel it against his chest like the force of opposing magnets that could fit if only they were arranged differently.  It reminds him powerfully of dogs, of the effort it takes to train around the opposition reflex that leads them to fight against every pressure.  He misses his dogs, and his house, and the safety of living inside a spun cocoon.  He wants so much in such a short span of time that the ache reaches right down to his teeth. 

As the hierarchy of those wants settles, it doesn't surprise him that at the moment, he wants most to say he's sorry.  At the back of his mind, pieces of himself grapple fiercely over this, a wide gulf between the part of him that believes he owes Hannibal no explanation and the part that draws up in its defense only the memory of Hannibal's hands, tremoring faintly, achingly deliberate and careful with Will's cheek though the effort of stitching it took so much out of him he blacked out when he'd finished. 

The scent of bourbon and nutmeg draws Will further forward, and buys him time.  His apology languishes in his throat. 

"Can I try the eggnog?"  he asks.  Whether his voice is rough from cold or guilt, even he isn't sure. 

"It will be better once it's aged two days at least.  I prefer a week for this recipe, but I'd be glad of your opinion in this case.  I'm not sure there's enough bourbon for your tastes."  The stiffness of his spine is here, too, in his consonants, in the white of his knuckles as he makes the final strokes with his whisk.  They are rapid, and sharp, and quieter than before. 

 

"I'm sure I'll love it.  I haven't had homemade eggnog in years."  Not since the last office party at the BAU, where Price made it so heavy on the rum Beverly was leaning into his shoulder after her second glass.  It all seems so far away, now, though oddly not as far as last Christmas, drinking gas station eggnog on the porch with Wally out of Molly's mismatched Christmas mugs. 

The half formed apology rears in his throat again, and Will closes the last distance to lean into the counter, his gaze intent on the concoction in the bowl.  It's easier to look at lazily swirling bits of nutmeg than it is Hannibal's face.  "When I said I didn't want to know where you planned to go after this—“

"We don't have to discuss it," Hannibal says, only further proving that they do.  The hurt in his voice is thick.  His hands are suddenly busy, seizing the whisk to cast it into the nearby sink. 

"I didn't mean—“  The denial is automatic, but Will catches the lie and reins it back in.  It will help neither of them to deny the conflict in his chest.  Their demons can only be dismissed if they first drag them into the light.  Between the two of them, they have spent too much time conversing with each other's ghosts.  Will exhales hard, and starts again.  "I don't _want_ to want to know where you're going.  By the time you're well enough to leave, I want to be stable enough that I realize I can live without you.  I want to be able to let you go." 

"Catch and release," Hannibal murmurs.  Soft, fond.  So pointed Will feels it through to his breastbone, a steel tipped arrow.  "Is that the kind of fisherman you are?"

Will swallows heavily.  In his ears, the ocean roars forth from his memory more forcefully than it has in weeks, fills him with the memory of buffeting currents and fingers gone numb with the cold.  The fight to hold on to Hannibal had consumed him then; nothing else in all his life had ever seemed so all encompassingly important. 

"You'd rather I consume you?"  The words on his tongue are hot as irons, the answer all too clear before they've even finished spilling out.  Careless of him to let them go he knows the answer, but he can’t help himself—

Not any more than Hannibal can, in confirming.  Their eyes meet, first, and Will feels the honesty of his answer before he hears it, bleeding out unchecked from the need in Hannibal’s eyes. 

“Yes.  Infinitely.  Is that something you’ve considered?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking.”

“Are you so sure you know what way that is?  There are many manners of consumption, after all.  Ingestion is a form of consumption, but they aren’t the same.” 

Continuing in this vein will get them nowhere, and everywhere.  Already Will can feel the familiar tingle at the back of his neck, the particular joy that comes from matching wits with the only person he’s ever met who thinks not precisely how he does, but in a way that fits with such perfect harmony that their very conversations seem to fade into unconventional verse. 

He shakes his head, and breaks meter.  “I thought about going out and trying to cut us a Christmas tree this morning.  Not anything big, not more than my shoulder could handle, but a little one; just something to have.”  His laughter cracks out, short and sharp like first fissures in ice.  “And then I remember where I was, and what it means to be here with you, and how I should be missing Molly and Walter and wondering how fucking miserable Christmas is going to be for them this year.  I shouldn’t be—“  He gestures limply forward, towards the eggnog.  He doesn’t properly finish the motion, mostly because it doesn’t properly fit.  It’s not because of this that he walked out in the woods; he left first.  “And I come back, and you made eggnog.”

It hadn’t occurred to him, really, to think that Hannibal, too, might be dwelling on the holidays.  A large oversight, now that he’s noticed it.  Back home in Baltimore, his house was decked to the nines for the season, bright and cheery and ready to host a number of events.  He might not have been big on celebrating the birth of Christ, per se, but then how many who celebrate Christmas really are?

Some do it to seek the _magic_ Dickens wrote about, or for their children, or for tradition.  For Hannibal, it was likely a mix of tradition and pageantry, but that doesn’t make his enjoyment of it any less authentic. 

There is almost a beat too long of silence, but then Hannibal is a little closer, leaning against the counter on the better side of his hips.  “It’d be nice to have a tree, if you’d like to get one.  I’m sure we can find ornaments in the attic.  I don’t think I’m up to the climb, but if you—“

“The fact that we’re standing here talking about getting Christmas ornaments out of someone else’s attic is kind of the point.”  Will can feel a headache coming on, just behind his eyes.  Blunt pressure, like the rise of structures too large for his skull to contain.  “How long are we going to keep acting like we’ve somehow made it into a world completely divorced from everything we’ve done to each other; do you think we can just keep _dancing_ around—“

“We’ve never done that properly at all.” 

Will pulls himself up short, the momentum of both his words and the pressure in his head broken by how thoroughly he’s knocked of his guard.  There’s amusement in Hannibal’s eyes when he looks, but with backbone behind it, the particular glint of determination.  Will says nothing, and leaves his questions in his eyes, and his silence.

“We’ve never danced anywhere.  You avoided most events I may have had an opportunity to ask,” he says, with the same ribbon of humor, veiling hope so deep that it’s clearly the mark of substantial risk.  If Will denies him, now, the fall he takes might be worse for him than the tumble into the Atlantic was for the gunshot wound at his waist.  He extends his hand, and it isn’t as graceful as he was while stirring.  The hesitancy is, in itself, beautiful.  Rare, like the glimpse of a hummingbird at rest.  “Would you do me the honor?”

Will clings to the counter to keep his hand from rising.  “It’s not that simple.”

“It can be.  We aren’t divorced of our past actions, but we do have a unique opportunity for a cleaner slate than we might otherwise have managed.  We have made it here, against all odds.  We can choose our path, with the benefit of knowing all that we are, and all we could be.” 

“If we can both choose, I can still choose to let you go.”

“I think it’s only fair I have a chance, first, to prove myself a catch worth keeping.” 

“Keeping, or consuming?  They aren’t the same thing.  Chiyoh never wanted to see you caged.”

“And yet I have been, and emerged.  Is that what you want, Will?  To cage me again?”

The use of his name sliced right through the closest layers of his defenses, quick  and sharp and to the point.  When they started this conversation, Hannibal had seemed exposed, but now he is, too.  Both of them, stripped intellectually naked, staring each other down in a room where they have far too many memories. 

“Not in the way you’re thinking,” he says, again, though no response but his own laughter chases it once it’s said.  “I don’t know what the hell I want.” 

Hannibal’s hand extends further, his fingers reaching so far the underside of them is white with the strain.  “Then dance with me.  Give me time to form an argument, while you’re making up your mind.” 

There is no music, in the kitchen, but when Will takes his hand it suddenly ceases to matter, if it ever did.  Hannibal hums under his breath, a song Will almost knows in the same way dreams blur to the waking.  Familiar, but distant; heavy with memory. 

Will closes his eyes, and they sway under the light of a moon two months gone down, blood on their hands and on their mouths, dancing to a waltz that plays only in the cadence of their shared breath, and the beat of two out of time hearts. 


End file.
